Why is Amazon winning? It’s not Sales Tax. It’s because Amazon is doing everything they can to combine their great selection with getting your purchases to you as fast as possible. That patent going around for predictive shipping is being reported so terribly. People keep focusing on getting something at your house you didn’t order. That’s not the real point of the patent. Figures 4A-4C of Patent No. 8,615,473 B2 demonstrate the real goal. They want to get items that are likely to be ordered into the networks of their package carriers, down to the local hub or first three digits of ZIP code, then slap on the address of a specific person who did order it, and get the item to the person insanely fast.

I know I’ve harped on this a lot, but it really is a shame that people in favor of sales tax changes have made this all about sticking it to Amazon, because there are legitimate tax reasons to favor taxing interstate purchases. Preserving sales tax revenue that used to be there means not having to raise or implement income taxes in order to get the same revenue per capita.

I’ve seen a lot of people expressing a lot of worry that the Verizon v FCC ruling was too generous to FCC power’s with respect to Net Neutrality, however I think that we should allow ourselves a little happiness about the ruling itself. Now that it’s over, Even Netflix thinks the nightmare claims of Net Neut backers aren’t going to happen. The radicals were lying all along about what the ISPs were going to do, folks.

Why shouldn’t we let the USPTO keep its own fees? It has incentive to approve bad filings. Now that the word Candy is trademarked, it’s time we defanged the USPTO. Give them a fixed budget like everyone else.

Google Glass users continue to be full of themselves. Now we’re hearing about a guy who thinks he’s above the law that prohibits bringing video cameras into movie theaters, and pointing them at the screen.

This is why I oppose comprehensive Communications Act reform. It’s going to be a clash of lobbyists, and a fight over who gets to be the winners and losers picked in the new law. Targeted reforms, please, targeted reforms. You see guys like Darrell Issa and Steve Scalise working hard to move the ball forward on Communications Act matters. The little guy does not win whenever one big bill comes down.

Oh this is clever: Ukraine looking at anarchists’ phones to find who’s in violent “protests.” When you’re armed and wearing a mask you’re not really a protestor engaging in speech, sorry. Even if the current administration in Ukraine is too pro-Putin, I can’t really back people like that, sorry.